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Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

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Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#151

Post by serbuvlad »

rpdillon wrote: post #141
serbuvlad wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've recently switched to a Mac after years on Linux, basically due to my frustration with the way the Linux desktop is being developed and the lack of quality all around for that platform. Overall, it's an absolute joy. It just works extremely well. Like any new platform it has its fair share of quirks and inexplicable behavior. My two biggest pet peeves are magic interactions that are very useful, but I don't know…

Meta-topic: I've seen this comment many times over the years, and it never results in a discussion where folks can agree. My reaction reading it is "You must be holding it wrong!" because I daily-drive Linux in many more ways than one (servers, laptops, desktops, handhelds (Hackberry Pi), SBCs, and, Valve-willing, VR headsets), and adore the Linux desktop. I use Pop!_OS almost everywhere, but Debian/Ubuntu/Arch with…

It's a bit deeper than just a series of bugs. For all of Linux's power and freedom, its modern desktop architecture is extremely restrictive.

* There is only one systemd --user session per user with one D-Bus instance. So you can only have one desktop instance active at a time.

* There is no way for privileged apps/scripts to generically control the desktop or other apps in Wayland. (so no accessibility, AI computer use or even general scripting)

* There is no differentiation between configuration that should be active on (user, machine) tuple, and configuration that should be active on (user, *) tuple. (even Windows gets this right!)

* Desktop apps do not report rich activity information so they cannot be smartly memory managed.

* Desktop apps cannot generally be restored after getting killed/system shutdown.

* No application identity, PIDs voluntarily take on application identities in Wayland and on D-Bus, but PIDs that don't can easily escape observability, and if they consume resources but not enough to show up high in top, good luck knowing about them.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#152

Post by anyfoo »

rendaw wrote: post #146
anyfoo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while. Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely…

But surely random crashes is better than a broken login screen that prevents you from doing any work at all?

I mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well.

You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.

In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#153

Post by JK-Swizzle »

kenhwang wrote: post #17
ainar-g wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This constant slide in quality over the past few years has me looking to Linux as an option. Just out of curiosity, what's holding you back? I'm not trying to evangelize or something, it's more of a personal collection of reasons various people have provided that I have.

For me, it's gaming, drivers, and still too much Windows-only software. Wine/Proton has gotten really good, but still requires tinkering, and still sometimes has really bad performance. WiFi/BT drivers continue to be really terrible, there's connectivity but speed and reliability sometimes aren't there. Peripherals and motherboard chipset functionality still mostly won't work. Desktop environments are still clunky an…

For what it’s worth, Proton has all but solved gaming on Linux. The only things I have been unable to run are games with low level anticheat.

It is so consistent I don’t even question if a new game will work.

Nvidia drivers on the other hand could still use some work. All wired for me, so I can’t speak to your driver troubles.

I have a windows vm for photoshop and the few programs I can not run native.

I personally run Mint and find it very reliable and capable. It has a windows style interface and my only issues are some minor things with taskbar settings and window snapping. For comparison, I could write a few novels on my issues with windows.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#154

Post by nairboon »

That's why I had to enable the "pause updates for four weeks" setting on Windows. Otherwise every second update would break something somewhere and disrupt workflows regularly. With the one-month update delay you'd get the updates that fixed the previous update.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#155

Post by tacomagick »

nairboon wrote: post #154

That's why I had to enable the "pause updates for four weeks" setting on Windows. Otherwise every second update would break something somewhere and disrupt workflows regularly. With the one-month update delay you'd get the updates that fixed the previous update.

I was on 24H2 and recently went to 25H2 for app compat reasons. I havent even been updating my Nvidia drivers for months, stuck in the 5xx releases because whenever I update to the latest studio drivers which are supposed to be stable, the computer fails to wake up from sleep and hibernation.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#156

Post by vunderba »

acuozzo wrote: post #69
HappySweeney wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOS 5 was awesome. I can't recall a single bug?

But DOS 6 was buggy as hell due to DoubleSpace.

As a kid I vaguely remember our family had a stack of Dr. Dobb’s Journals with one particular article actually warning about the dangers of doublespace, and since it was completely optional (despite being touted as a flagship feature) we kind of dodged a bullet and had a pretty reasonable experience with DOS 6.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#158

Post by tempodox »

karp773 wrote: post #43

My favorite one was a few years ago when MS rolled out a Visual Studio with the login window broken. Literally, it was impossible to log in. I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

> I still cannot believe a company like Microsoft can fall so low.

They have always been so low. I cannot believe a software company can be so hilariously bad at their core business and yet rise so high.

Re: Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste

#160

Post by wink »

rendaw wrote: post #146
anyfoo wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people just forgot how insanely unstable and prone to breaking MS OSes were back then. Crashes and hangs that take down your entire machine were common, and “reinstalling the OS” was seen as a normal thing that you just had to do every once in a while. Windows 95 was pretty much broken “by design”. This is truer than it seems, especially if you skip being charitable by taking the context into account, namely…

But surely random crashes is better than a broken login screen that prevents you from doing any work at all?

Just not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.
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